Re: [gentoo-server] Best practices in managing large server groups

[Ramon van Alteren]

Charles Duffy wrote:
> I'm looking at replacing SuSE SLES9 with Gentoo for an enterprise
> application (for reasons of flexibility and licensing) (no, we don't
> have an enterprise application budget -- just the reliability
> requirements; yaaay, startups!). We're looking to be able to deploy and
> manage hundreds of geographically distributed servers.
We're using gentoo and managed to scale from 1 server to 600servers.
>
> Some particular questions which come to mind:
>  - Should I be using a custom profile or a standard profile with
> overrides through make.conf, /etc/portage/* and the like?
We currently use a standard profile and override if necessary.
>  - What's the Right Way to create new system images ready to be loaded
> onto a hard drive or run through a virtual machine? gentoo-buildhoster
> looks interesting. I've seen Catalyst mentioned as a way to create
> stage3 images, but what documentation I've been able to find doesn't
> seem very much targeted for my use cases.
We''re using a combination of catalyst, pxe and the cli-installer from 
agaffney which we extended to support our configuration database.
catalyst stage4 works fine for us and enables us to repeat build our 
system images. Additionally we use the packages generated by catalyst as 
input for our
binary package server. We're currently looking into the tinderbox target 
to use catalyst to validate new packages on existing system images.

After installing we use a grub config file which allows us to reinstall 
over pxe very easily.
>  - Any experiences with puppet? With out ratio of servers to staff,
> automating configuration and administration is a priority. (We already
> have an internal tool written with automating the server configuration
> process in mind; it has some functionality puppet doesn't, and puppet
> has functionality it doesn't; in theory, I'd like to extend puppet until
> our internal tool becomes unnecessary, though I'll need to understand
> puppet much better before I can think too hard about that).
Puppet works fine for us, we used to run our own scripts for 
configuration stuff but that grew too complex and hard to extend.
We're currently converting to puppet and actually just finished 
converting our web farm to puppet-controlled hosts.
Stability is sometimes an issue and we are actively looking for 
scalability issues with our current setup but overall we're extremely 
happy with the tool.

Ramon
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